Our goal this year is to break the 500 attendee ceiling. How do we do that? We open up more tracks and invite other technical communities to talk on data focused topics. The Azure community will have a track to talk on the current offerings that the Microsoft cloud offers in way of Data Platform capabilities. The Office 365 / SharePoint Community will also be invited to submit sessions on unique offering in the data space that their community can share. With MySQL and PostgreSQL now being offered in Azure, we may still see more presentations from OpenSource communities. In addition to “R” the statistical analysis language that is a key language of the Data Scientist community, we can also expect to see presentations on Python as both “R” and Python now able to be called from T-SQL Stored Procedures.

A History of the first 4 SQLSaturday’s held in Vancouver, BC

Vancouver was the first SQLSaturday outside the USA back in 2011 with SQLSaturday #65. It was an event held the weekend before the Microsoft MVP Summit in Bellevue Washington, so the event was infused with speakers from around the Globe. The event took place at a swanky hotel in the heart of downtown Vancouver. The event was a smashing success. Michael Lato was the main organizer, but Rich Baumet and I did a lot to make the event successful as Michael was on the other side of the country.

Rich Heigis wrote a blog that can be found here. Aaron Bertrand wrote his blog post here. Michael Lato blogged multiple times here. Donabel Santos also wrote a blogpost here.

Vancouver’s 2nd SQLSaturday (#114) found a new suburban home in BCIT’s Burnaby’s Campus. A more modest sized budget and with fewer attendees, the event was once again orchestrated by Michael Lato, and I popped by the day before the event to help out with the onsite event execution. Not being on the